Blockchain technology appears as one of the best options to improve the fishing industry

In an article recently published by the Spanish company, Pesca con Ciencia, blockchain technology has been mentioned as one of the most efficient options to improve the fishing industry. According to the company, the actions that Ecuador has taken to reverse the yellow card of the European Union, the staging of the Organic Law on Aquaculture and Fisheries and other initiatives at the private level show progress in the field of sustainability.

Likewise, they have indicated that in February 2022 the Regulation of the Organic Law for the Development of Aquaculture and Fisheries was officially signed, whose regulations will guarantee the sustainability, traceability and transparency of these two important productive sectors of the country.

In the published article, they highlight that according to a report from the Ministry of Production, Foreign Trade, Investments and Fisheries, this type of progress is of vital importance in the framework of compliance with the recommendations of the DG-Mare, to reverse the yellow card imposed by the European Union, since the Regulation details control and sanction procedures, principles of the legal regime of fishing, and guarantees the traceability of export products, among other contents.

“And it is that the execution of this set of regulations, added to other initiatives, will guarantee transparency in the sector, an aspect considered increasingly essential in different parts of the world”, they point out

Pablo Guerrero, Director of Marine Conservation at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF Ecuador), affirms that if Ecuador wishes to continue keeping the markets of the European Union and the USA open, modern traceability schemes must be adopted to allow products to be tracked as they move through supply chains.

On the other hand, he highlighted that WWF Ecuador has been promoting the development of modern electronic monitoring and reporting systems that are much more effective and efficient than the traditional ones, which are based on human observers and “paper logs”.

In this sense, the company Pesca con Ciencia has commented that innovation is also transcendental. That is why they point to a blockchain-based software system which is capable of providing mechanisms to transfer information from the capture of the resource to the final point, interconnecting all the participants, such as fishermen, distributors, processors, supermarkets, restaurants and consumers.

“When it comes to transparency, solutions based on this type of technology allow decentralized and immutable registration of all activities throughout the value chain”, they highlighted.

Blockchain technology background with fishing industry

On the other hand, the professor of the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral (ESPOL), Carlos Mera, has indicated that from the perspective of the consumer, the need to know the origin of the fish can be satisfied, who captured it and when and whether it was properly stored or transported.

“While from the authority, the use of this technology allows knowing if a batch of fish has been caught in an authorized location, the storage conditions, transportation used, and other data”, hecommented.

Mera also took advantage of several successful cases of blockchain-based traceability and transparency solutions in different countries. “In Norway, the Seafood Association in collaboration with IBM and other companies are working to demonstrate the benefits of traceability based on this technology and to define future standards for the industry,” he said

Another initiative is the one carried out by the company Provenance, through a pilot plan carried out in Indonesia, which demonstrated the effectiveness of using this technology for the traceability of tuna fishing. A third case is the collaborative blockchain-based tuna fishing project being carried out by WWF in New Zealand, Australia, and Fiji to decrease illegal fishing and human rights violations of fishermen,” he added.

That said, it should be noted that in Ecuador, the use of blockchain is not a strange issue for the aquaculture industry, which has reported implementations of traceability and transparency through IBM’s Food Trust platform.

To anchor this technology to the Ecuadorian fishing sector, the ESPOL professor considers that the challenges that a traceability solution would face would be similar to those reported in the Provenance pilot plan and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) project. “One of them is that, although there are platforms that generally offer partial coverage of the value chain and ignore the capture phase, mature companies already have large software systems, for example, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), whose integration and interoperability with a new decentralized platform based on blockchain may require less effort”, he argued.

““Secondly, another challenge would be that paper-based processes have a significant space in the fishing industry, so the level of digitization required could represent an impact on the current paradigm, added to the scarcity of technology providers at the international level. national and software professionals to lead implementation projects with this technology”, added Mera before stating that the lack of incentives or a sufficient regulatory framework that promotes the participation of all those involved in the process, could mean another challenge for the sector.

One step away from certification

Finally, the article also commented on the certification services of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which guarantee compliance with internationally recognized standards that cover sustainable fishing and the traceability of fish and shellfish (through chain of custody certification) for extractive fishing. In Ecuador, the MSC certification process is in a complete evaluation stage for the fishery.

They have also said that Guillermo Moran, Manager of Tuna Conservation Group, Tunacons, indicated that the international company SCS Global Servicie, qualified by the MSC, is working on responding to the latest public comments on the final report for the certification of fin tuna fishing. yellow in the eastern Pacific Ocean in the sets on Plantados and Brisas, of its five founding companies (Nirsa, Eurofish, Tri Marine, Servigrup, Grupo Jadran).